The Justice Department says one of America's biggest medical schools kept a separate door into its classrooms — no screening score, no interview — and that who got to walk through it came down to race, three years after the Supreme Court banned exactly that.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division announced on Wednesday that it has found Ohio State University's College of Medicine discriminated against white and Asian applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned race discrimination in admissions.
According to the department, the medical school runs admissions through what it calls a "Holistic Approach," in which screeners score applicants across three categories — Attributes, worth up to 12 points; Experiences, up to 16; and Metrics, up to 8 — before an interview stage. Investigators found that Black applicants who were screened and interviewed were about 2.8 times as likely to be admitted as Asian applicants with equal credentials.
The findings describe a second route in: a "side door" pathway under which some applicants were admitted without receiving a screener score and without sitting for an interview. Through that pathway in 2024 and 2025 combined, the department found, Black applicants were four times as likely to be admitted as white applicants — and no Asian applicants were admitted at all. The findings also fault "super screeners" who are able to view an applicant's race, and the school's use of a socioeconomic scale developed at UC Davis, which investigators treated as a proxy for race. Median MCAT scores for the 2025 class, as set out in the findings, were 514 for Black students, 515 for Hispanic students and 517 for Asian students.
"Despite SFFA, OSU Med allows some applicants to bypass its own screening process and skip interviews solely because of the color of their skin," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division. "The use of a separate admissions process based on race is plainly illegal under federal law, and this Department will not allow these appalling practices to continue at OSU Med or any other federally funded higher ed institution."
"A university's admissions process, and all its stages, should apply equally to all applicants regardless of race."
Ohio State says it "strongly disagrees with the findings," maintains it is in full compliance with the law, does not consider race, ethnicity or other protected characteristics in admissions, and will "contest these findings."
The Justice Department said it will seek a voluntary resolution with the university and will file suit if the talks fail. The Ohio State investigation, opened in March 2026, is the tenth such finding the division has issued against an institution this year, with some twenty investigations still open — and the department says its review of medical schools' compliance is continuing.